Our Band Could Be Your Life

MELODY MAKER INTERVIEWER: ARE THE BUTTHOLES CLOSER TO GOD OR SATAN?

GIBBY HAYNES: GOD, DEFINITELY. WHY TAKE A CHANCE?

The Butthole Surfers really seemed like they were from another planet. Upon first hearing, their music inspired the nearly universal reaction, “What the hell is this?” It was creepy and dark and ugly and weird. Admitting you liked it would probably lose you some friends. And that was nothing compared to their live shows, depraved acid hallucinations of transgression and horror that were often physically dangerous to band and audience alike.

And in a way, the Buttholes really were from another planet: Texas, to be exact. The Lone Star State was largely out of the cultural loop, even the underground loop. But that didn’t mean it didn’t have its fair share of artists, misfits, and rebels; more than most places in the country, bands made their own fun there, and thanks to the vast quantities of sunshine, both liquid and otherwise, the fun wound up being pretty bizarre. By the time the rest of the country found out about what was going on there, the underground scene in Texas had become a weird, inbred mutation.

Although they were galvanized by bands like Black Flag and Public Image, Ltd., the Butthole Surfers weren’t punk rock in the generally accepted sense of the term. Their music was too eclectic and acid-fried for that, largely free of the rage and angst that typified the genre. In fact, it had a lot to do with the newly coined genre of performance art that had begun to sweep the art world in the early Eighties. But in terms of doing-it-yourself, being confrontational, and assuming an overall damn-the-torpedoes attitude, they were punk rock 100 percent. It was a completely self-invented, self-willed band—they produced their own records, booked their own tours, designed their own album covers, and staged their own increasingly ornate stage shows.

And yet this enigmatic band would never reveal their motives. Were they out to frighten? Insult? Seduce? Repel? Rebel? Or merely to entertain? It was hard to tell, which may have been precisely the point: the underground had noted the fate of painfully sincere, classically oriented bands like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements and begun championing bands who favored sensationalism over emotion, experimentation over classicism. The Buttholes, always up for a good submersion in the fetid cesspools of the psyche, were a reminder that the underground was still the rightful preserve of some of the culture’s most bizarre manifestations.

With vocals hollered incomprehensibly through bullhorns, wild jungle drumming summoning up an unholy blend of violence and lust, gory films, dry-ice foggers, strobes, and a naked dancer short-circuiting every last brain cell of every last member of the audience, the Butthole Surfers were the real deal: while many underground bands tried to express insanity by making meticulously insane music, the Butthole Surfers allowed their genuine perversity to dismantle their music completely.

When the Butthole Surfers played, it was like a twisted circus had come to town. It was a low-budget performance art spectacle that Spin’s Dean Kuipers once called “a gypsy commune of killer clowns reveling in their own morbid fascinations.” And yet, Kuipers went on to point out, the band was disgusting but not offensive. This was probably because their grotesquerie was at once so inward-looking and yet universal—everyone appreciates a good doody joke.

In 1982 Jeffrey “King” Coffey was “a friendly, goofy, sixteen-year-old kid” playing in a Fort Worth hardcore band called the Hugh Beaumont Experience and publishing a fanzine called Throbbing Cattle. In the midst of the infernal Texas summer, he and a buddy took a Greyhound bus down to Austin to check out a crazy band they’d been hearing about.

When they walked into the Ritz club on Austin’s rowdy Sixth Street, they were blown away. It wasn’t just the fact that the place was packed with punk rockers, which was an amazing thing to see in Texas in 1982—it was the people onstage. “Here was this band that didn’t really look like a punk rock band—they just looked weird,” says Coffey. “It was more of a performance art kind of thing. And they were playing this weird, hideous music.”

The singer had dozens of clothespins stuck in his hair and was wearing nothing but underpants and occasionally making unspeakable noises with a saxophone. The guitarist was rocking back and forth, glaring psychotically at a wall of the club like he was going to kill it. The bass player had his hair in a pompadour the shape of the Alamo. “They just looked like dweebs,” Coffey recalls, “but really fuckin’ scary dweebs.”

The singer was Gibson “Gibby” Haynes and he was no stranger to show biz. He happened to be the son of Jerry Haynes, better known as Mr. Peppermint, longtime host of a popular kiddie TV show in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Although he was a “freak” in high school, the six-foot-four Haynes had also been a top student and star basketball player; on an athletic scholarship to San Antonio’s Trinity University, he studied economics, was named “Accountant of the Year,” was captain of the basketball team, and graduated with honors. After graduating in 1981, he got a job with the prestigious accounting firm Peat, Marwick and Mitchell and was on track for a lucrative career.

But by then he had hooked up with Trinity art and business student and Frank Zappa fan Paul Leary Walthall, who soon shortened his name to Paul Leary. Leary had grown up on proletarian rock like Creedence Clearwater Revival and his beloved Grand Funk Railroad, but his tastes broadened once he got to art school. Besides punk rock, one of his favorite discoveries was Sixties conceptual artist Yves Klein, who once put on a performance that involved a ten-piece orchestra playing a C-major chord for twenty minutes while three naked women, covered in blue paint, rolled around on a canvas under his direction.

So when Leary saw a tall, crazed-looking guy walking around campus with spiked hair and a black leather jacket, he knew he’d found a kindred spirit. “Gibby was the weirdest guy at school, so we fell in real well,” said Leary. “We both liked horrible music.”

Leary and Haynes published a fanzine called Strange V.D., which featured the most horrendous medical photographs they could find accompained by captions describing fictitious diseases like “taco leg” and “pine cone butt.” Haynes surreptitiously printed the zine on the photocopier at work but got caught by one of Peat, Marwick’s partners after he accidentally left a photograph of some mutilated genitalia in the machine. Shortly thereafter he left the firm.

Haynes headed to Southern California in the summer of ’81; having dropped out a semester short of an MBA, Leary joined him in Venice and together they eked out a living making Lee Harvey Oswald T-shirts, pillowcases, and bedspreads and selling them on the beach. “Then we just decided that was too much work and thought maybe music would be easier,” said Leary. “So we started a band.”

They returned to San Antonio and began playing dire art noise in various underground venues, including their debut at an art gallery. “It was more of a performance piece than a musical piece,” Leary said. “It involved lots of stuffed dummies and toasters and Big Mac hamburgers and things. We played music while Gibby ran around with a piece of meat hanging out of his mouth.”

The band changed its name for every show—at various times they were called: Ashtray Babyheads, Nine Inch Worm Makes Own Food, Vodka Family Winstons, and the Inalienable Right to Eat Fred Astaire’s Asshole—until one fateful night. “We had a song called ‘Butthole Surfers,’ ” says Leary, “and the guy who was introducing us that night forgot what we were called and so he just called us the Butthole Surfers.” Since that was their first paying show, they decided to let the name stick. At the time—and for years afterward—one could barely utter the band’s name in public, and their name was often abbreviated in advertisements as “B.H. Surfers.”

San Antonio didn’t exactly warm to the Butthole Surfers. “They hated us there” was Haynes’s succinct assessment, and besides, the town was not exactly a rock mecca, so they sold all their possessions, bought a cranky old van, and went back out to California in the summer of ’82 with drummer Quinn Matthews and his bassist brother Scott. Almost immediately they got on a bill with the Minutemen, the Descendents, and fellow Texans the Big Boys at the Grandia Room and cut a short demo tape with Spot. But L.A. was crawling with musicians trying to make it, and though most of them were far from well-off, they still had more money than the Butthole Surfers—according to Leary, the penurious band was reduced to scavenging from garbage cans for their dinner.

Still, Leary and Haynes somehow managed to land a show at the Tool and Die in San Francisco. But on the way up from L.A. their van began breaking down; by the time they reached the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, the engine was about to die. They barely made it up the slight incline to the crest of the bridge, coasted down the rest, took the first exit simply to get out of traffic, then limped into town until the engine finally gave out completely—right in front of the Tool and Die. They had just begun unloading their equipment when a woman came out of the club and asked what they were doing. “We told her and she said we weren’t playing,” Leary says. “And we cried.”

It’s hard to imagine this band of reprobates weeping, but the situation was desperate. “We were hoping to get like twenty-five bucks or something,” Leary says. “We didn’t even have gas money to get out or anything.” The club eventually took pity on the band and let them play three songs. Luckily, Jello Biafra happened to catch the set and invited the Butthole Surfers to open for the Dead Kennedys at the Whiskey in L.A. on the Fourth of July.

It was a crucial break. The Buttholes schmoozed Biafra assiduously, with Leary’s and Haynes’s formidable sweet-talking skills very much in play. Knowing Biafra’s fascination with obscure regional scenes, they enthusiastically bent his ear about countless Texas bands—none of which really existed. The Buttholes fit in perfectly with Alternative Tentacles’ cavalcade of punky weirdos, and Biafra offered to release a record by the band.

They found a place in a grimy, industrial neighborhood at the south end of downtown L.A. Leary’s job at a lumberyard lasted only a couple of weeks—“Everybody I was working with was missing hands and fingers and stuff,” he says. “I just didn’t want to do that.” Desperate to avoid a day job, Scott Matthews decided he would try to get on the game show The Joker’s Wild instead, but after trying for a week or so, he gave up and headed back to Texas along with his brother.

Haynes and Leary soon retreated back to San Antonio (“with our legs between our tails,” quips Leary). The band almost immediately re-formed in order to open for the Dead Kennedys in Dallas, but later that night Haynes broke his hand punching Scott Matthews’s face. The Matthews brothers soon elected to leave the Butthole Surfers.

King Coffey’s band the Hugh Beaumont Experience had been on the bill that night, and he and the Buttholes hit it off. “We kind of shared a similar aesthetic,” says Coffey, “as far as being punk rockers but also being into drugs and arty kind of aspects of music.”

As it happened, the Hugh Beaumont Experience was about to break up. According to Coffey, a couple of the members found themselves in legal difficulty and left town. So the Buttholes needed a drummer and Coffey needed a band. Neither situation lasted long.

Haynes and Leary liked Coffey’s style—he used just two drums and a cymbal and played standing up. “I would just be jumping up and flailing at the drums like this trained monkey,” says Coffey. “I guess it was hysterical to look at.” In turn, Coffey looked up to the slightly older Haynes and Leary. “They had gone to college and studied art,” says Coffey, “and they obviously were really intelligent.” He joined in the spring of ’83.

The band had already started recording their first EP at a San Antonio studio called the Boss. Haynes and Leary knew the owner, who not only let them sleep there at night, but also let them record at bargain-basement rates.

Coffey was the last of several drummers on the recordings and appears on “Barbecue Pope” and the Beefheartian rockabilly of “Wichita Cathedral.” The opening number is “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” basically frenetic bursts of hardcore noise alternating with Haynes shouting, in his best Yosemite Sam voice, couplets such as “There’s a time to shit and a time for God / The last shit I took was pretty fuckin’ odd!” Elsewhere are walloping, almost mechanistic grooves topped by Haynes’s hysterical shrieking; songs like “The Revenge of Anus Presley” are a somehow blissful wallow in an absurdist, scatological mire.

In fact, the absurdist, scatological part was a major aspect of the band’s aesthetic, especially Haynes’s, as a 1986 interview in Brave Ear fanzine so clearly revealed:

GIBBY: Remember the perfect pencil?

PAUL: One time he took a shit in the ladies room and he wanted someone to go look at it. He tells me someone drew a pencil in the toilet and I had to check it out.

GIBBY: I told him it had to be seen to be believed. A perfectly drawn pencil in the toilet. I mean, how do you get someone to look in the toilet? You got to tell them there’s a drawing of a perfect pencil on the bottom.

The resulting Brown Reason to Live EP was released on Alternative Tentacles. The notes listed no musicians, and all the band’s bio contained were enigmatic jokes like “As their sound developed, so did their ability to judge between right and wrong.”

All their recording had been done on credit and the band had run up quite a bill, but Alternative Tentacles didn’t have enough money to pay to get the tapes for the band’s first album out of hock. So as a stopgap they released the cheaply recorded Live PCPPEP EP (a classic Butthole Surfers title: part potty joke and part drug reference)—mostly concert versions of material on the first EP—on Alternative Tentacles. Although they weren’t very pleased with the record, the band lived off the exceedingly modest royalties for the better part of a year.

The band now included bassist Bill Jolly and soon added another member. Figuring they could beef up the sound with another drummer, they drafted Austin art-punk musician Teresa Taylor (aka Teresa Nervosa) that fall. She and Coffey bore a strong resemblance, and they often told interviewers they were brother and sister. Visually and sonically, the effect was striking. “It did sound a world better to have communal drums playing,” Coffey says, “like a tribe.”

In the early Eighties, a sprawling underground tape-swapping network had sprung up as home-duplicated tapes of hardcore bands criss-crossed the country through the mails. The Butthole Surfers’ demo was a popular item. After a Dead Kennedys/Necros show in Detroit, Jello Biafra had stayed at the home of Necros bassist Corey Rusk and given him a Butthole Surfers tape. Rusk loved the tape, but it soon got stolen. Some time later, Rusk’s friend Ian MacKaye stayed over while on tour with Minor Threat. MacKaye had a tape of some weird new band called… the Butthole Surfers. Rusk eagerly made a copy.

The Necros were probably the only punk band in Toledo, Ohio, in the late Seventies. They had hooked up with Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson, who published Touch & Go fanzine in Lansing, Michigan. Stimson and Vee liked the band so much that they created Touch & Go Rekords just to release a Necros four-song 45 in the spring of ’81. “We didn’t even know what a record label was,” says Rusk. “It was just something you put on the piece of paper on the vinyl.”

They pressed a hundred copies of the Necros record (titles included “Sex Drive” and “Police Brutality”) and sold fifty, mostly to friends, when Systematic Distribution in California called. They wanted seventy-five copies. “It blew our mind, like, who are these people that would want seventy-five of these and we don’t even know who they are?” says Rusk. The Necros began touring the country, opening for bands like D.O.A., the Misfits, and Black Flag.

Rusk was so excited about the prospect of recording that he started working at a lumberyard his senior year of high school, loading boards on trucks to finance a Necros EP produced by MacKaye later in ’81. Touch & Go started releasing records by tasteless provocateurs the Meatmen and noisy hardcore outfit Negative Approach, with Rusk doing sales and distribution while the more outgoing Vee did the promotional work.

Then Vee moved to D.C. in late 1982, leaving the operation to Rusk and Lisa Pfahler, Rusk’s girlfriend. The couple ran a strictly bare-bones operation, doing everything themselves just to save money. Rusk even saved up for a reel-to-reel four-track recorder and installed it in his grandmother’s basement so he could record bands himself. “We worked just nonstop,” says Rusk. “You couldn’t have done it if you didn’t love it. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.”

In January ’84 Pfahler and Rusk moved into a house in a down-at-heel neighborhood of Detroit, next door to a Chrysler factory. They ran the label there until the fall of ’85, when they moved to an apartment above an all-ages club on Detroit’s bustling Michigan Avenue called the Graystone, which they ran.

The Graystone was a logical step: since he was seventeen, Rusk had been promoting all-ages shows by countless bands, including the Minutemen, Black Flag, and the Misfits, and even though he delivered pizzas for a living, he never took a penny for his efforts—all he asked was to get reimbursed for expenses. It was a great deal for the bands—where the local rock club might have paid the bands about $300, they might walk away with nearly triple that at one of Rusk’s shows.

Partly because they worked without contracts and partly because they felt the low-powered label couldn’t do bigger bands justice, Touch & Go had released only records by friends. But in 1984, after various key distributors picked up several releases, Rusk and Pfahler started to think about approaching bands they didn’t know personally. The first was explosive Milwaukee band Die Kreuzen. “We got to know them a little bit at a time from playing with them and talking to them and felt comfortable that they were people we could be friends with,” says Rusk. Rusk and Pfahler also dreamed that someday maybe they would put out a record by the Butthole Surfers. And then it happened.

“One day, it was the summer of ’84, they called us out of the blue,” says Rusk. “I remember being in bed, it was in the morning and Lisa and I were still in bed and the phone rang and it was Gibby from the Buttholes and we were both peeing our pants.”

Alternative Tentacles didn’t have enough money to release the band’s first album, so the Buttholes were interested in talking with Touch & Go even though the label was far from established. But Pfahler and Rusk, who were now married, wanted to meet the band first and see them play so that, as they had with Die Kreuzen, they could see if they could become friends before they became business partners. The Rusks soon set up a show for the Butthole Surfers at a tiny club in nearby Hamtramck and invited the band to stay at their home.

At the time, Haynes and Leary were crashing at friends’ places or at the Boss. The whole band was washing dishes for a living. Then they all decided they were better musicians than dishwashers, so why not make Rusk’s show the first stop of a national tour?

But their only vehicle was their new bassist (Bill Jolly had left, having “forgotten he was in the band,” says Leary) Terence Smart’s compact ’71 Chevy Nova. Even pulling a U-Haul trailer, how to fit five people, two drum sets, two amps, two guitars, two Radio Shack strobe lights, and a female pit bull named Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad? “Well, you saw out the barrier between the trunk and backseat,” Leary explains. “You take out the backseat. And you cut a shape out of a piece of plywood to fit in so that three people can lay down horizontally with the dog. It was two people in the front seat and three people and the dog in the trunk.”

They stowed their few possessions in a friend’s garage, painted the Nova in wild fluorescent colors, with “Ladykiller” scrawled on the sides and “69” on the hood and trunk, installed a roll of barbed wire on the front bumper, painted teeth onto the front grille, and took off for Detroit. “Screw you, Texas,” Coffey remembers thinking, “we’re never coming home again.” It was the beginning of a two-year odyssey.

For five freaks traveling through deepest, darkest redneck country, the trip up to Michigan, as Coffey puts it with some understatement, “was a real eye-opener.”

On the way, Taylor and Coffey walked into a fast-food joint outside Dallas. Coffey had a nose ring and an outgrown purple mohawk that was lapsing into dreads; these were the days before MTV had spread the punk look far and wide, and virtually everyone in the restaurant stared at the pair like they were from Mars.

No sooner had they placed their orders than two rednecks walked up to Coffey. One of them said simply, “I don’t like it,” and punched Coffey in the head, knocking him to the floor. The two men laughed as they walked away. “And everybody in the restaurant was just looking at me like, ‘Yeah, you got what you deserved,’ ” says Coffey. “All I did was order a filet of fish and fries.”

After that they made sure to travel in a group if possible. Still, the band started looking freakier and freakier—Leary began sporting a sideways mohawk done in cornrows and dyed hot pink; Taylor let her hair grow into dreads, although she eventually shaved off all the dreads except for three that popped out of her head at random spots, and those were dyed brilliant red. “Our bass player then basically did his hair like Bozo the Clown,” says Coffey. “And Gibby had a fucked-up geometric haircut that was just… fucked up.”

At the Hamtramck show, Rusk decided the Butthole Surfers were one of the most amazing bands he’d ever seen. “They were just outrageous,” Rusk recalls. “They were just so over the top. With the two stand-up drummers, they all just seemed like they were out of their minds.” Rusk even took a shine to Mark Farner, and the Butthole Surfers had a new label.

For the Butthole Surfers, Touch & Go wasn’t only a label. “If we needed a loan, [they] would wire it to us,” said Coffey. “If we needed to go into a studio, Touch & Go would write us a check. It was all recoupable, but Corey and Lisa were always there for us.” On one tour the state police confiscated the band’s van in Massachusetts and deposited the band, their equipment, and Mark Farner in a parking lot by the side of the highway. They called the Rusks, who happened to be in New York, and the couple drove all the way up to Boston to pick up the band and take them to the next show.

And as they spent the next couple of years roaming the country in search of sex, drugs, and shows, the Rusks’ place was home base, where they’d sometimes stay for weeks while Haynes plotted the next leg of the tour.

The best Haynes could do was line up perhaps a week of shows, a month in advance. So the band was never sure what the next few months would hold. They’d simply aim for parts of the country where they hadn’t been and hope for the best. “We’d pull into a town,” Haynes said, “and we didn’t know where the clubs were. We’d literally pull over somebody and say, ‘Hey, where do the queers hang out? Where’s the college area?’ ”

They lived like gypsies, blowing into town, taking up residence, and (barely) scratching out an existence. “When I think about it now, it’s so laughable because we were literally living from hand to mouth,” says Coffey. “We had this really cocky attitude, like, ‘We’re the best band in the world and every other band is so inferior so ha-ha-ha, fuck you, world.’ But looking back on it, we were punks living out of a van.”

The band usually found places to play, but sometimes their outrageous stage show would burn some bridges. “It seems like everywhere we play we insult people and make them regret having us there,” Haynes told Forced Exposure.

“Takes ’em about six months to forget about it,” Leary chipped in. “Then we come back.”

On their first trip to New York, they played the East Village’s notorious Pyramid club. The club’s gender-bending regulars stayed out of the small performance space in the back, but a small crowd of underground cognoscenti who gathered for the show saw something they’ll never forget. Once the band had cranked up a surging, demonic whirlwind, a scantily clad Haynes skulked onto the stage with his back to the audience, then slowly turned around to reveal his face, which was distorted by a transparent plastic mask of a woman’s face. It was an unbelievably simple trick, but the effect was horrific. His hair was full of clothespins, which he shook off in an impressive spray.

“Gibby had star status,” says photographer Michael Macioce, who saw that show and soon befriended the band. “All of us that were around him were aware that this was a person who unfolded like a flower—but in his case, the flower that unfolded turned into this… creature.”

In New York they met kindred spirits like Sonic Youth and Live Skull—arty bands who played the punk circuit because there was nowhere else to go. “We kind of understood each other,” said Thurston Moore, “because we were doing something apart from the two-second hardcore song.”

The few years they had on the hardcore kids made all the difference, and it was tremendously exciting to come across a band that was on the same wavelength. “The Butthole Surfers were the hugest band in the world to us and a lot of people,” says Moore. “When the Butthole Surfers came to town, it was this huge event. People don’t realize that—a lot of what was going on in the indie scene, a lot of it’s been dissipated just by the way things have developed. You don’t really remember how heavy certain things were.”

But there was a big difference between the cool, self-possessed New Yorkers and the wild-eyed Texans. “Whatever insanities we had, we tried to get out onstage,” says Lee Ranaldo. “When we came offstage, we weren’t drug-addled freaks. And those guys were. Onstage or offstage, there was no dividing line between the two.”

The previous year the band had made a very important New York connection via Mark Kramer, bassist for the mega-bizarro East Village band Shockabilly. Kramer had been on tour with Shockabilly when he happened to use the dressing room toilet in a Dallas nightclub and began to laugh out loud.

THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS IN A TOUCH & GO PROMO PHOTO. FRONT ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: TERESA TAYLOR, MARK FARNER OF GRAND FUNK RAILROAD, KING COFFEY. BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: JEFF PINKUS, GIBBY HAYNES, PAUL LEARY.

“What the fuck is so funny in there?” demanded the club’s manager, who had dropped by to leave the band some beer and pretzels.

“Well, there’s some graffiti in here that says BUTTHOLE SURFERS: WE SHIT WHERE WE WANT,” Kramer replied. (The Buttholes knew their rock history: the graffito was a paraphrase of something Mick Jagger had said when the Stones were busted in the mid-Sixties for urinating behind a gas station.)

The Butthole Surfers, the manager explained, were a bunch of assholes who were a rock band.

Kramer was intrigued. A few nights later Shockabilly played Austin. “And, sure enough, I’m introduced to a guy named Paul, who I’m told is the guitarist for this band of assholes,” Kramer recalls. Leary was clearly in sweet-talking mode: “He says he washes dishes at some foul dive in a bad part of town,” Kramer continues, “and that the only decent thing about it is that he can listen to anything he wants to listen to in the kitchen, and he always listens to Shockabilly.”

Early the next year Shockabilly did a brief tour of Texas. The opening act arrived in a desecrated little Nova, “a car that seemed to have just been dragged ass-first out of some junkyard,” in Kramer’s words, containing “five acid-drenched band members” and a pit bull. “In the eyes of this dog,” Kramer says, “rests all the peace and serenity I would be deprived of while crossing Texas with these psychopaths.”

The next time Kramer met up with the Buttholes, they were all crashing at the East Village apartment of inveterate indie scenester and former Touch & Go employee Terry Tolkin. “They had no money whatsoever, not a single penny amongst them,” Kramer recalls. “Gibby was a wholly unmanageable drunk twenty-four hours a day, awake or asleep. Coupled with the enormous amounts of acid he was taking, I was constantly in fear for my life, his life, and the life of anyone we passed on the street who was unlucky enough to cast him a sidelong glance. I imagined myself his champion—his protector in the big city. I imagined that he couldn’t possibly get out alive without my stewardship. But these kinds of people never get a scratch. He’d have walked away from a fifty-car pileup, I’m sure. He was untouchable. Communicating with him was not unlike being trapped in a very small cage with a gorilla.

“ ‘What???!!! What the FUCK did you just say to me? You fucking homosexual!!! You goddamned dick smoker!!! I heard you!!!! I heard what you said!!! I will fucking cut your throat!!!! Speak, asshole! SPEAK NOW or be dead in ten seconds!!!!’

“ ‘I didn’t say anything, Gibby. I swear it. I mean, I did say something maybe five or ten minutes ago, but you didn’t seem to hear me, so I—’

“ ‘What???!!! Don’t you ever fucking call me that again or I’ll skull-fuck you with my tiny Texas cock!!! OK??? OK!!!??? Do you fucking understand me now, you little New York City motherfucker?!!! Or do you wanna die right here and now with your fucking face nailed to my lap??!!’ ”

The rest of the band was no less curious. “Looking into King’s eyes, I spied what seemed like a streak of intelligence, but somehow, for some reason, he could barely speak,” Kramer recalls. “Teresa was equally mute in both words and facial expressions. Yet these two came alive onstage, side by side, drumming on their feet with a musical precision that, for me, redefined the term ‘reckless.’

“I was constantly in awe of what was happening around me,” Kramer says. “I loved these people. They were, well, family.”

Every night they parked the Nova, now covered in graffiti, on a dingy street on the Lower East Side, where it acquired a fresh layer of graffiti by morning. Eventually they got rid of it and bought a van from what Leary calls “a gypsy” for a very hard-earned $900. Naturally, it was a lemon—the engine ran on only two cylinders and gobbled gallons of oil.

Now almost penniless, the band practically starved between gigs. Coffey recalls Smart reaching the breaking point one day and suddenly screaming, “I NEED MILK! MY BODY NEEDS MILK!” They explained to him that they only had $5, which had to last for another couple of days—milk for one person was out of the question. “And then he said—quite sanely—‘Why are you doing this? This is insane!’ ” says Coffey, who replied, “I’m doing it, Terence, because I’d much rather be in New York, playing in a kick-ass band full-time than washing somebody’s dishes for a living. This is what I want to do. This is it.”

But it wasn’t easy. “I remember Gibby getting the flu, and six months later he’s still got the flu,” Leary says. “That kind of stuff. It was bad.

“I can’t believe we lived through that,” Leary continues. “Man, I’ll tell you what, I’m glad to be alive—it kind of seemed like we were in a constant state of suicide the whole time. It wasn’t like, ‘Gee, we’re going to become successful and make a lot of money.’ It was more like, ‘Man, we’re going to have a lot of fun before the end comes and we all hit the can.’ I didn’t think there was any way out.”

They were eventually reduced to scavenging for cans and bottles so they could turn them in for the nickel deposit. It was quite a come-down for Haynes, who was all set to be a successful accountant just a couple of years before. One day some prankster ran up and kicked all the bottles out of Haynes’s bag. “Gibby and the rest of us were on our knees, scurrying to collect the bottles again,” says Coffey. “And I looked in Gibby’s eyes, and he was about to cry. It was just so pitiful—this big, strong guy like Gibby being reduced to tears because here he was on the streets of New York, groveling for bottles. But good god, we needed those bottles.”

Touch & Go released the band’s debut album the final week of 1984. Haynes had wanted to call it Psychic… Powerless and Leary had wanted Another Man’s Sac. So they compromised and simply put the two phrases together: Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac. The title is nonsensical, and yet it does conjure up something. “Yeah,” Leary agrees in his Texas drawl, “and it’s kind of bad.”

Like the best Butthole Surfers albums, Psychic… Powerless… makes it impossible to concentrate on anything else while the record is playing. The troglodytic rhythms crowned with tortured guitar, various rude noises, and Haynes’s horrific vocals are a grotesque echo of the mediocre music of the Seventies and early Eighties. “We… come from the same place of just hating what we heard, and wanting to make something that was even worse that people would hate even more and somehow get paid for it,” said Leary. “That’s what we were trying to do; make the worst records possible.”

This approach extended even to the album cover: a pair of photos from an old book about skin diseases overlaid with crude fluorescent pink, orange, and green doodling courtesy of Haynes and Leary; one horribly disfigured face is made to throw a skeleton-handed peace sign.

The influences were clear: the cacophonous jungle howl of the Birthday Party; the Fall’s caustic chants; Pere Ubu’s art-punk; the synthetic mystique of the Residents; the eerie, bleak side of Public Image, Ltd.; and the turgid, rambling assault of Flipper. But Psychic… Powerless… found the band synthesizing it all into a singular, relentlessly squalid vision. On the lumbering “Lady Sniff,” Leary’s elemental twang momentarily parts for the sounds of farting, vomiting, bird calls, belching, Japanese television, and hawking up phlegm. “Pass me some of that dumb-ass over there, hey boy, I tell ya,” Haynes hollers, redneck-style.

Haynes had taken to making his stage entrance with a dummy duct-taped to his body so it looked like he was dancing with it—then he’d tear it off and start attacking it. He’d sing through a megaphone, an idea that was stolen ad infinitum over the next ten years. Often he’d wear several layers of dresses and peel them off one by one until by the end of the show he was down to his skivvies. He’d stuff his clothes with condoms filled with fake blood so that when he’d fall on the floor, he’d turn into a gory mess; he’d hurl reams of photocopied pictures of cockroaches into the crowd; he’d pour a flammable liquid into an inverted cymbal, then whack it, sending up a geyser of flame; he’d usually set his hands on fire, too. There was the time he made his entrance through a hole he’d cut in a mattress covered in fake blood. Often the whole band would rip apart stuffed animals onstage, like a frenzied pack of psychotic cannibals. “It was just madness,” says Coffey. “It was just the more the merrier.”

Once the band began to make a little more money, the special effects began to get fancier. It all began when Coffey joined the band—he had put a strobe light under his clear plastic drum, lighting it up brilliantly. A few months later the band met a guy with a bunch of stolen strobes, and they got several thousand dollars’ worth of lights for a few hundred bucks. The show snowballed from there. “It just seemed like what we wanted out of a rock show ourselves, so we were willing to try to deliver it,” says Leary.

The visual chatter and tandem thunder of two stand-up drummers flailing at their instruments added yet more to the chaos, and the strobe lights flashed almost constantly, giving the proceedings the air of a traumatic nightmare. “It was just a mind-fuck of a show,” says Coffey. “In some ways it was like the Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland movies, like, ‘Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!’ But that got horribly confused in the land of psychedelics and punk rock.”

The Buttholes were hardcore, but in the original sense—being hardcore wasn’t necessarily about playing really fast or having militant lyrics. It was about being extreme. “We’d try anything to get attention,” says Coffey. “But it wasn’t attention for attention’s sake; we were trying anything that would be as much of a spectacle as humanly possible.” The stage show grew gradually until one day they realized that all the props and special effects took up more space in the van than the instruments.

They had recorded most of a second album in San Antonio before they set off for Detroit and parts unknown, then carried the tapes around the country for months, recording and mixing tracks whenever they could scrape up enough money.

The back cover was a photograph of the straining crotch of a female bodybuilder in a thong bikini, her inner thighs bulging with veins. As usual, the artwork bore no credits or pictures of the band, which they felt would only distract from the purity of the package. The album’s title—Rembrandt Pussyhorse—stemmed from Haynes’s and Leary’s penchant for stringing together three-word nonsense phrases (a device they’d use on at least two more records). Even the rest of the band didn’t understand what it meant. “It’s a Gib thing,” Coffey says with a shrug.

The opening dirge “Creep in the Cellar” is seemingly a paean from Haynes to his own darkest impulses. “There’s a creep in the cellar that I’m gonna let in,” Haynes intones in slow-motion singsong, “and he really freaks me out when he peels off his skin.” During playback of the song’s rough tracks, the sound of a backward fiddle appeared out of nowhere. It turned out that a country band hadn’t paid their bill, so the studio simply recorded over their multitrack tape. Amazingly, the manic sawing fit the Buttholes track perfectly. “By the time we figured out how to turn it off,” says Leary, “we didn’t want to turn it off.”

With goth, industrial, and even techno overtones, the music was not punk in the already established sense; several songs eschewed punk’s typical 4/4 time and were in 6/8, like sea chanteys from hell. The tracks were crammed with nearly subliminal sounds and low-rent versions of the high-tech digital effects—stuttering quasi-scratch tricks; huge, booming drums; pitch shifting—then ruling the Top 40 and dance charts. A prime example was the bizarre, almost cubist deconstruction of the Guess Who’s 1970 hit “American Woman,” a song that managed to be both misogynistic and antiwar.

Haynes barely sang at all, preferring instead to wail, mutter, howl, and shriek, funneling it through various electronic devices. When an interviewer asked why Haynes electronically manipulated his voice so much, Leary explained, “It’s just because, y’know, he’s got knobs and he can do it. It’s like, why does a dog lick its balls?” Haynes added, with alarming plausibility, “It’s probably just my need to express my multiple personalities.”

There was a very creepy Gibby on “Perry”—the Perry Mason theme recast as nightmarish carnival music while Haynes, ad-libbing in a repulsively haughty English accent, encapsulates the band’s raison d’être: “It’s about coming of age, it’s about learning how to do it, it’s about learning how to experience things the way they ought to be experienced, it’s about growing up, it’s about licking the shit off the floors, it’s about doing the things that you ought to do. It’s about being a Butthole Surfer.”

In a Playboy review of the album, ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz said he’d love to direct a Butthole Surfers video. Sadly, they failed to call his bluff. In his Seattle Rocket “Sub Pop” column, Bruce Pavitt called Rembrandt Pussyhorse “the coolest record ever made. This unbridled, surreal burst of imagination is enough to erase years of indoctrination by schools and television viewing. It’s finally OK to do whatever the fuck you want. We can only go up from here.”

The band wandered all over the country—Chicago, Detroit (where “people would throw animal parts at us,” Leary says. “It was a real cool town for us”), Seattle (where they stayed for a month and made a big impact on local musicians such as future Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil), Atlanta, New Orleans—winding up in San Francisco in the summer of ’85.

Once they’d grown tired of San Francisco, the band wondered, Where to next? They were all tripping one day when someone jokingly suggested moving to R.E.M.’s home base of Athens, Georgia (which also happened to have been a notorious drug mecca). “We thought it would be a trip to, for no apparent reason other than it seemed funny, move to Athens,” says Coffey. “And stalk R.E.M.”

They wound up a few miles outside of Athens, in tiny Winterville, where they stayed about seven months, working up new material and playing gigs. And stalking R.E.M.

Their first night there, Coffey spotted R.E.M.’s Mike Mills at a club and invited him to a barbecue in Winterville. Mills smoothly put him off by suggesting that Coffey contact R.E.M.’s management with the particulars, which Coffey dutifully did. “And of course the next day was spent waiting for Mike Mills to show up,” says Coffey. Not surprisingly, Mills never came.

The Butthole Surfers’ obsession with a pop band like R.E.M. is a bit surprising. “I think we were fascinated by the amount of fame they were getting,” says Coffey. “And they were easy subjects for ridicule. But by the same token, we also had a certain fondness for some of their songs, like their radio hit songs. We’d say, ‘Aw, this is horrible!’ And then of course it would be in our heads for two weeks.” (By 1987 they often ended shows with a demonic version of R.E.M.’s hit “One I Love.”)

And of course, R.E.M. were already wealthy men by this time, unlike the Butthole Surfers. “I think we were jealous of them,” Coffey says. “Hell yeah,” Leary agrees. “Jealous as shit.”

In Georgia their rickety van called it quits in spectacular fashion—as Haynes and Leary were pulling into a parking lot, the engine started smoking and quickly burst into flame. The two men bailed out of the van, Mark Farner in hand, and watched it burn.

After an Atlanta show that August, they stayed at the home of a friend whose younger sibling knew Amy Carter, daughter of ex-President Jimmy Carter. Amy happened to be over at the house that night, but she avoided the unsavory activities in the living room and stayed in her friend’s bedroom, waiting for her parents, who were due to pick her up at 4:00 A.M. Naturally, the Buttholes were excited to witness the arrival of the former president. At about 3:30 Amy came out and deposited her suitcase in the living room, briefly introduced herself, smiled, and retreated back to the bedroom.

At 3:45 the house was quickly surrounded by Secret Service cars, almost as if a raid were about to occur. Naturally, the Buttholes, high as kites, got a bit nervous. But then at 4 A.M. sharp, a black limousine pulled up, and Amy emerged from the bedroom and went out the door carrying her desecrated suitcase. Her parents lingered in the carport area as some excited and very stoned Butthole Surfers peeked out from the curtains, trying not to scream in disbelief.

And then it happened: former United States president James Earl Carter picked up the suitcase to which Butthole Surfers singer Gibson Jerome Haynes had applied his genitals. The president then put the suitcase in the trunk, got in the car, and they sped off into the humid Georgia night.

It was time to hit the road again, and by the time the tour reached New Orleans, Terence Smart had fallen in love with the Buttholes’ old friend Michiko Sakai and wanted to leave the band and be with her instead. “Poor Terence,” says Leary. “One night we were sleeping on some wretched floor of a punk rock dive in Atlanta, Georgia, and he woke up and he just couldn’t take it anymore. He was screaming, ‘WHY? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?’ We were like, ‘Well, it’s fun [laughs].’ He was out of there within five minutes. We never saw him for a long time.” (Smart and Sakai eventually married and had a son named Maxwell.)

Touch & Go recommended a nineteen-year-old Canadian named Trevor Malcolm to replace Smart. Malcolm came down to Winterville to join the band, sight unseen, carrying a tuba stolen from his former high school. The instrument took up a lot of space in the van, but Malcolm insisted on carrying it everywhere; but, while the Buttholes were on a Canadian tour, a local paper ran a picture of him playing the tuba. No one was happier than Leary when Malcolm’s old school waited for the band to get to Windsor and confiscated the instrument.

The band was beginning to see the results of all the touring. Word was spreading through fanzines and word of mouth that the Butthole Surfers were a great live band. And although the band’s original following consisted of punks and freaks, a more chin-stroking, collegiate crowd began to filter in. “While our records might have been weak,” says Coffey, “we had a reputation of being a good freak show to check out.”

By now the Buttholes’ show featured a grotesque assortment of films projected on a backdrop behind the band. Among the filmic arsenal: autopsies, atomic explosions, accident scenes, facial plastic surgery, meat-processing procedures, people having epileptic seizures, scare-tactic driver’s education films, etc. “We tried to get Operation Dry Pants,” says Leary, still ruing the missed opportunity, “which is about toilet training of Down’s syndrome [kids].”

At first Taylor, a media major at the University of Texas, borrowed films from the school’s vast visual library; later, as their cinematic appetites grew more specialized, a certain “Dr. Haynes from the University of Texas” would order films from medical catalogs. And very soon, just as people would offer drugs to the famously pixilated band, others would offer films. The most infamous depicted a man undergoing penile reconstruction after a farm accident. “I recall the day that arrived in the mail,” says Coffey. “We screened it for the first time and we were just screaming in complete horror.” Sometimes they ran it backwards.

“It just seemed funny,” Leary says of the more ghastly aspects of the band’s stage show. “And fun. I mean, rock music’s got to be something that your mom would hate—if you want it to be really satisfying. We made music that moms would really hate, shows included—like nudity and violence and belching flames and smoke and hideous, loud, damaging music.”

The Butthole Surfers’ shows seemed almost intentionally designed to freak out not just moms but the many audience members who were tripping. The music was nightmarish and violent; the films were horrific. “I always thought we’d be a terrible band to take acid to,” says Coffey, “just a really bad, bad idea.” If the projectionist was really on top of it, he or she could focus the heinous imagery on the periodic walls of smoke that would come spilling off the stage. “And it makes this cool effect,” says Leary, “where you can see this image come blasting out at you—in focus.”

“The full-on shows would make people puke and scream and run out, that kind of thing,” Taylor said. “It was what we’d always wanted.”

Actually, not all the films were so shocking—they’d often do a split screen with undersea footage, nature scenes, or even a treasured color negative of a Charlie’s Angels episode. The contrast was Haynes’s idea. “It was a total mixture of good and bad images coming at you, so it was more of an assault that way, your mind can’t quite digest it,” says Coffey. “It’s not completely good or bad—it’s both.”

Still, the gross-out footage is what really embodied the band’s aesthetic. “Listen, man, one has no choice but to laugh in the face of terror,” Haynes explained. “I think probably most airline pilots, when they see the ground coming at them, just before they hit, go, ‘Oh my god, we’re in trouble! Ha-ha-ha!’ ”

The hardworking Leary taught himself how to use an old vacuum-tube eight-track recorder and started in on their next album. “They were kitchen recordings,” Coffey said, “done right next to the fryer and the bacon grease.” Leary acted as his own apprentice, learning from his mistakes, although the beauty of Butthole Surfers records was that the mistakes often became the keepers.

They recorded half of the four-song Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis EP in Winterville. “Comb” opens with some all too realistic vomiting sounds, followed by Haynes’s heavily distorted voice, like a short-circuiting fifty-foot robot, splattering a sonic wasteland of nuclear guitar noise and Godzilla-stomp drums. The EP also features “Moving to Florida,” in which Haynes plays a crazy old coot intent on nuking the Sunshine State. “I’m going to hold time hostage down in Florida, child,” Haynes drawls in an extended monologue. “I’m going to explode the whole town of Tampa Bay.”

Leary explains the EP’s enigmatic title by revealing that originally the cover art was to feature a depiction of Sammy Davis Jr., who had a glass eye, with creamed corn spilling out of his eyeball socket. “But it was just too brutal,” Leary says.

With Cream Corn and beyond, the Butthole Surfers were kicking over a rock and were looking at all the stuff that squirmed around underneath: incest and bad trips and corrupt businessmen and schizo rednecks and Bible thumpers and all kinds of bad American craziness. It was on very much the same wavelength as David Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet, which came out the following year. But in exploring that dark, forbidden territory, they were also welcoming it and even partaking in it. And the pressure was always on to up the ante, to bring something even more unpleasant into the circus, if only to keep things interesting.

Malcolm quit the band in Winterville. He was miserable, partly since when the band drew lots for which room they’d get, he drew the worst lot and wound up in the basement with the washing machine. At night he would watch in horror as blue bolts of electricity shot across the room. “It was stressful—he didn’t know anybody there and he was in this tiny, tiny room that’s emitting sparks and playing with the Butthole Surfers,” says Coffey. “You know, I’d split, too.”

A temporary bassist played a Midwest tour, but he didn’t want to go on the upcoming European tour, so the band had to think fast. They called Kramer, their New York friend. “Kramer, you better not have been lying when you said you wanted to play with us worse than you wanted to fuck your little sister,” Leary said on the phone, “ ’Cause we need you bad.”

Once, they had pulled up to the City Gardens club in Trenton, New Jersey, and were told their show had been canceled in favor of the Replacements. (“We were replaced by the Replacements!” Coffey notes.) But the Buttholes pleaded poverty and successfully lobbied to open the show as Playtex Butt Agamemnons. The Buttholes’ chemical excesses unnerved even the bibulous Replacements. “I remember them showing up and asking me if I knew where they could find some acid,” recalls Replacements roadie Bill Sullivan. “They were really insane then. They actually scared us. They scared the hell out of us.”

Most people were sure the band tripped for every show. “Not every show,” Coffey clarifies. “Personally, I can’t play drums on acid. The one time I did, I got a little too lost in the ride cymbal.”

But pot was a necessity for most of the band. And when they couldn’t get it, which often happened in Europe, there was hell to pay. “We would just drink more to compensate and [the band] would get pissed off because there was no pot around and we would have literally violent shows where people would get punched out,” Coffey says. “We would piss on and punch out anybody else in our path.”

For a bunch of Texans who had never been out of the country, Europe was “like going to the moon,” Leary says. “Those people are different over there. It really inspires you to kick it up extra hard. It’s an alien environment and they start to piss you off after a while.” It’s an unusual comment considering that Europe is renowned for paying bands better, putting them up in hotels, and even feeding them. “They feed you a load of crap is what they do,” Leary scoffs. “They get you a cake and they smile and they’re sticking something else up your ass at the same time. I’m telling you, you don’t want to get involved with those Germans over there. They’ll take you to town.”

The night of their appearance at the huge Pandora’s Box festival in the Netherlands, Kramer went to fetch Haynes for sound check. “It is firstly most important to state that, on this night, Gibby had eaten an entire handful of four-way acid tabs and drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam before the sound check had even begun,” Kramer notes.

Leary was furious at Haynes for getting wasted for such an important show. “Fuck that stupid-ass motherfucker,” he snarled to Kramer. “I hate this fucking band. I swear to fucking Christ on a stick, I hate this fucking band more than I hate myself. And that’s a lot. I don’t even care if we ever play again. If you can’t find him, fuck it. FUCK IT!!!!” With that, he began smashing a couple of guitars with his bare fists.

The festival featured several stages, and Kramer eventually found Haynes at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show. As Kramer tells it, Haynes was completely naked, repeatedly fighting his way onto the stage and charging at Cave as hulking security guards punched and kicked him off the ten-foot-high stage and back into the audience, where he would remain for a few seconds before trying to claw his way back onstage again. Finally, guitarist Blixa Bargeld came forward and kicked Haynes in the groin with a pointed German boot. This time Haynes did not get up.

Kramer pushed his way through the crowd to come to the aid of his bandmate, only to find him lying unconscious. “I bend over to see if he is still alive, but he seems not to be breathing,” Kramer says. “I poke him in the shoulder. Suddenly, like a volcano, he bursts to life and swirls his fists in every direction, clipping me but good, along with a few innocent girls, and drawing the ire of their boyfriends and the enraged security guards, who are now motivated to leave Mr. Cave to his own devices, descend the stage, and join the boyfriends in administering a thorough and none-too-subtle beating upon Gibby’s face, head, and shoulders, until he is once again unconscious on the floor.”

Or so it seemed. Actually, Haynes was only pretending he’d been knocked out, and as the hired thugs walked away, he rose to his feet and began screaming at them, “DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! GODDAMN FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY FILLED WITH NOTHING BUT FUCKING TURD BURGLING FAGGOTS!!!! I FUCK YOUR ASS IN HEAVEN AND HELL!!!!! FUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOU!!”

“The ensuing chase and capture was the stuff dreams are made of,” Kramer says. “Stark naked like the day he was born, beaten, bruised, bloody, and tripping, this icon of modern music ran like Jesse Owens through the entire complex, down the halls, up the stairs, grabbing beer bottles from people’s hands as he went and throwing them down on the concertgoers below. A hail of beer cans, bottles, and miscellaneous garbage rained down upon the Dutch persons as I finally caught up with Gibby just as a throng of the biggest security guards I had ever seen caught up with him, too.

“At this time there were perhaps twenty hands upon him, holding him down, and although Gibby is completely crazy, he is not stupid. ‘I’M SORRY!!!! I’M FUCKING SORRY!!!! PLEASE DON’T BEAT ME ANYMORE! I HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR!!! I CAN’T HELP THE WAY I AM!!!! PLEASE DON’T HIT ME AGAIN!!! IT’S AGAINST MY RELIGION!!!!’ ”

Haynes then made a successful run for the dressing room and slammed the door behind him. Kramer could hear Leary and Haynes screaming at each other inside, and when he finally worked up the courage to open the door, he found the two of them smashing guitars, bottles, and chairs in what Kramer calls “the most potent example of bad behavior I have ever seen. To this day, more than fifteen years later, I have no more vivid memory of the effect a life in music can have on a human being.”

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. “BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!!” Haynes screamed, eyes flashing in delirious anticipation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and gestured at them as if to say, “Take anything you want.”

Just before they went onstage, Haynes chugged an entire bottle of red wine; moments into the set he dived straight into the horrified crowd, which parted like the Red Sea. Haynes knocked himself unconscious on the floor, to warm applause from the theater’s security team. “I look down at Gibby,” recalls Kramer. “He tries to move, but then collapses as vomit begins pouring from his mouth.”

After the gig Haynes was irate about having been unconscious for most of the show and insisted on getting paid within five minutes or he’d be “taking it out on your Dutch testicles!” Haynes snatched up the fistfuls of guilders and stuffed them in a pair of pants in his guitar case, but almost immediately forgot that he had been paid and went on yet another rampage, streaking naked through the festival complex and screaming that he had been ripped off.

“FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY OF COCK-SUCKING QUEENS!!!! YOU FUCKING BEAT ME UP AND THEN YOU RIP US OFF!!!! WHICH ONE OF YOU FAGGOTS STOLE OUR MONEY??!!!! FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!!”

Yet another chase scene ensued, and yet another pack of Dutch goons wrestled Haynes to the ground, and yet again he profusely apologized. “After which he is released once again,” Kramer says, “and once again dashes through the halls screaming obscenities while grabbing beer bottles from people’s hands as he runs and hurling them against the brick wall.”

“Those fuckin’ Dutch,” Leary explains, “they kind of get you pissed off after a while, man.”

“We thought we had just ruined our careers by botching this show,” Coffey says. “Of course, the Dutch loved it—‘The mayhem it is beautiful, it is wonderful, every song erupted into chaos!’ ” The next day the local paper ran an article about how the Butthole Surfers were the sensation of the festival. “So of course, every time when we came back after that and just played music, people would be horribly disappointed,” says Coffey. “ ‘[In Dutch accent] How come you do not beat up people?’ ”

Kramer’s now defunct band Shockabilly was far more popular in Europe than the Butthole Surfers, and several unscrupulous promoters simply billed the band as Shockabilly, angering audiences who had paid their money to see another band. One such show was a graduation party for engineering students in Stavanger, Norway. In protest, Leary walked onstage with his pants around his ankles. The promoter nervously asked Kramer if he would mind asking Leary to pull up his pants, but Kramer pretended to misunderstand. “Get up and dance now?” he hollered back. “Of course you can get up and dance! Come on up!”

This little game went on until the police showed up, at which time Leary gingerly pulled up his pants and ran into the dressing room, locking the door behind him. “As I tried to jimmy the door open, I could hear Paul on the other side piling what sounded like guitar cases against the door,” says Kramer. Haynes managed to talk the police into leaving the scene, and after much coaxing, Leary emerged.

Meanwhile, “the crowd of all these Aha-looking types were staring at us with crossed arms,” says Coffey. “When it became obvious that the crowd were just assholes, Gibby rightfully snapped, ‘Fuck you, guys,’ and insisted that everybody leave the room.”

Haynes proceeded to verbally and physically abuse the audience, heaving beer bottles at the walls until he forced literally everybody but the band out of the club. The band resumed playing to the now empty house. People started to creep back into the room, but Haynes bullied them right back out again. And then the band played some more. “That was pretty fun,” Coffey says, smiling at the fond memory, “literally forcing people out of the room during a show.”

They then began a U.S. tour in November, but Kramer quickly fell very ill from food poisoning, perhaps exacerbated by the stress of knowing that the driver of the van they all crammed into on those late night after-show drives was invariably tripping his brains out. Jeff Pinkus replaced him in early ’86.

Finally bored with the claustrophobic Athens scene, they left Winterville and resumed their peripatetic existence.

Taylor quit in December, done in by the stresses of being in the band, and they drafted a new drummer, a woman named Cabbage, “who really couldn’t play the drums at all,” says Leary. “She had a place to practice, though.” They rehearsed in Cabbage’s warehouse space in a section of downtown Atlanta that resembled a war zone; the band stayed at her house, too.

Cabbage introduced the band to her friend Kathleen Lynch, who made her debut at one of the Butthole Surfers’ most infamous shows.

In early ’86 they drove from Los Angeles all the way to New York just to play two lucrative weekend shows at the Danceteria club, only to arrive to find that the second night had been canceled. The band was livid; Haynes got quite drunk just before show time. “During that show it was just complete bedlam,” says Leary, a man who knows from bedlam.

After only a song or two, Haynes picked up a beer bottle and viciously smashed Leary over the head with it. Leary’s eyes rolled back in his head as he crumpled to the floor. Then he quickly got up and resumed playing. It was a stunt bottle, made out of sugar. Then Haynes picked up a real bottle and heaved it the length of the room, where it exploded above the exit sign. Soon Haynes had set fire to a pile of trash in the middle of the stage. “And you’re really thinking, ‘Should I get out of here?’ ” says Michael Macioce. “That was the type of feeling you had—you were in danger at one of their shows.”

Then Lynch jumped onto the stage from the audience and began dancing. Macioce then left—it was about three in the morning by this point—but he called his friend Kramer the next day to see how the rest of the gig had gone. “That girl, she pulled down her pants and Gibby started sticking his thumb up her ass!” Kramer told Macioce. He was fucking her with his thumb just back and forth and this went on for like a half hour or forty-five minutes, just like that!”

And that was only the beginning. The band had played only five shambolic songs before Leary leaned his guitar against his amplifier, producing ear-splitting feedback; the strobes were flickering, sirens were flashing, the films were rolling, and through the dry-ice fog a couple of open fires burned brightly.

“Gibby filled up a plastic whiffleball bat full of urine—he managed to pee in the little hole in the end of the bat,” says Leary, “and made this ‘piss wand.’ ” Haynes then began swinging the bat, spraying urine all over the crowd. But it didn’t stop there—Lynch, now completely naked, lay down on the stage and Haynes, in Leary’s words, started “mounting” her. Later Leary saw video footage of the scene. “Her legs are up in the air and there’s Gibby’s pumping butt in the strobe lights and the smoke,” says Leary, chuckling. “It’s really fuckin’ hideous, man.”

In the midst of the chaos, Leary went around discreetly poking screw-driver holes in every PA and monitor speaker in the place.

After the show there was a tense confrontation between the Danceteria management and the band. The Buttholes got paid, but they literally walked out of the place backward as the club’s hired goons not so subtly showed them the door. “You’ll never play New York again!” the club’s manager screamed after them. “And we were playing at CBGB within two weeks,” Leary crows, “for more money!”

Afterward the band invited Lynch to become a part of the stage show; she wound up dancing with the Butthole Surfers for years. By the Buttholes’ next New York visit, she’d become an integral part of the show. “She had a shaved head… her body was painted, the show was just wild,” remembers Kim Gordon. “Gibby was swinging her between his legs and blowing fire. It was, like, the most insane thing.”

Gordon had attended the show with her bandmate Steve Shelley. “I remember standing kind of toward the back with Steve, and somehow he ended up getting his glasses broken,” says Gordon. “I don’t know exactly what happened….”

Lynch quickly became nicknamed “Tah-dah, the Shit Lady.” According to Leary, the story around was: “She got a job in New York City at some sort of Sex World place, and the first night on the job they were telling her the routine, like, ‘OK, if a guy looks at you, you take off your clothes and you do this and do that.’ So she gets in there and the first thing she does is bend over and sprays a wall of diarrhea. And then she stands up and goes, ‘Tah-dah!’ So everybody is running out screaming. Of course, they didn’t fire her—the next night they were out there advertising, ‘We got black pussy, we got white pussy, and we got the Shit Lady!’ She became a featured attraction.”

Lynch was never a formal member of the Butthole Surfers, though. “We would begin a tour and out of nowhere Kathleen would show up,” says Coffey. “And then kind of disappear again. She was like the wind.”

Nobody in the band really had a conversation with Lynch until years after she left—in fact, she didn’t speak for an entire year, a practice Coffey believes had a spiritual basis, like fasting. The silence posed constant practical problems, however, like the time they stopped at a roadside restaurant in Louisiana. “Kathleen jumps out of the van and is the first one to rush into the restaurant,” Coffey recalls, “and greets the hostess by kind of half squatting and making gesturing motions toward her crotch and somehow getting across, ‘I need to pee, where is the bathroom?’ ” The hostess waved vaguely toward the bathrooms, with one eye on the band of freaks who had just walked in the door.

“She loved the human body, smells of the human body, dirty socks, urine, things of the body were really beautiful to her, BO was beautiful, and we had a hard time making her bathe,” Taylor recalled. “I remember once we pretty much had to hold her down and do her laundry and she was yelling, ‘No, no!’ ”

The live show was reaching new heights. That March at San Francisco’s I-Beam, Leary stripped naked and dived into the crowd while Haynes leaped on Lynch and the two rolled around the stage like fighting cats, knocking equipment and mike stands around the stage like bowling pins. The audience looked on, aghast. By the end Haynes was alone onstage howling, “No! No! No!” like a wounded animal through the megaphone and bashing a flaming cymbal, sending up towering mushroom clouds of fire. Then a stuffed lion dropped onto the stage, and the rest of the band madly tore it to bits, hurling the stuffing into the crowd.

That fall Rusk booked the Butthole Surfers for Halloween weekend at the Graystone, with Big Black and Scratch Acid opening one night and Die Kreuzen and Killdozer opening the next. All five bands stayed at the Rusks’ apartment, and after both shows they went up to the building’s big, flat roof and barbecued and set off fireworks all night, as was the Graystone tradition. Another tradition was watching the nightlife on the street below. There was a redneck bar on one corner and a lesbian bar on the other. “And when the bars would let out at night,” says Rusk, “we’d all get up on the roof and watch the lesbians beat up the rednecks.”

The second night of the Butthole Surfers’ visit, the bands partied on the roof as usual. Then they all watched as a convenience store across the street went up in flames. “And as soon as the fire trucks pulled away, Gibby and Paul said, ‘Let’s go!’ ” says Steve Albini, then of Big Black. “And they bolted down the stairs, out the front door, ran across the street, and looted this liquor store. They came back with six smoky, damp cases of beer.”

Unfortunately, Cabbage never improved her percussive skills. “We figured she’d catch on eventually—just a little bit of rhythm is all it takes,” says Leary. “And she just got worse and worse. We finally reduced her to one drum and then with no microphone at all.” The band knew she came from Tennessee, so when they passed through there in April ’86, “We kind of dropped her at her family’s place,” says Coffey, “and said, ‘See ya!’ ”

In the fall of ’86, they settled in Austin. In the Sixties Austin hosted a thriving hippie scene and became known as a home for renegade music of all kinds: psychedelic pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators, Janis Joplin and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, whose titular singer sported Day-Glo robes and face paint and highlighted performances by shooting flames from his headpiece. Thanks to locals like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, the town was also the headquarters for country music’s famed “outlaw” movement. It was a fitting home base for the Butthole Surfers.

The Buttholes moved into a rental home in a no-man’s-land just off the highway at what was then the northern edge of Austin. They painted the walls silver and slept on pieces of plywood suspended from the ceiling. They’d also gotten hold of a device that shot foam insulation between walls, and the house was filled with sculptures they’d made with the machine. Much of the house became a recording studio; when the parts for a new mixing board came, everyone smoked lots of pot and sat around soldering hundreds of connections.

The band missed Taylor and asked her back. Since the band was determined not to tour so much anymore, she accepted and moved into the house; they finished their third album there.

According to Pinkus, one of the advantages of recording the album at home was that “we could take hour-long breaks to do bong hits,” and there was more than just a bit of stoner humor in the statement—not paying for recording time meant they could work at a more relaxed pace and really explore the possibilities of the studio. This was something most bands on indie labels couldn’t afford to do.

Unlimited studio access allowed the Butthole Surfers to confront an interesting problem—how to replicate the polymorphous perversity of their performances on record. They couldn’t include a strobe light and a smoke machine with every record, so they threw in all the studio tricks they could muster in a vain but admirable effort to make a sonic analogue of their live show.

But Leary has a low opinion of the music. “I always thought we were the band without talent at all—it’s just all a bunch of schlock,” he says. “God, it’s music to drool into a bucket to.” So perhaps the overwhelming studio gimmickry and the riotous showmanship were just a way of making up for lackluster music? “Yeah,” Leary says with a little laugh. “That’s probably one reason.” Another reason for the outrageous shows was to justify the band’s large performance fee. “We wanted to be able to charge a lot of money for the tickets,” Leary says, “so we felt obliged to kind of give something back.”

Despite the nearly universal disapproval of the indie community, the Buttholes resolutely refused to feel bad about wanting to make money. “Whatever weed we were smoking, we wanted it to be more plentiful and of better quality,” says Leary. “And we wanted better-quality food, we wanted better quality accommodations, we wanted better-quality vehicles to travel around in, we wanted better equipment to play on, and all those wants far outstripped what we were bringing in.”

The individual members didn’t directly make any money from the band. Instead, Haynes, the former accountant, controlled the funds and disbursed them as necessary. “There was so little resources that all the money was in one pocket and we all stuck together,” says Leary. “If one person bought sunglasses, all five of us bought sunglasses; if one person bought shoes, we all bought shoes. We were just never apart, not for any meals, not anything. We were just always together. If we got a motel room, we all stayed in the same room.”

Many shows ended with Haynes walking offstage with the petite Taylor tucked under his arm, while she continued banging a drum. It almost looked like something a dad would do. And perhaps the Butthole Surfers were like a family—or maybe more like a cult—with Leary and Haynes as the dysfunctional parents, Taylor and Coffey as the quiet, odd twins, and whoever was playing bass as the sullen teen who inevitably ran away.

A review of their 1987 album Locust Abortion Technician in the zine Puncture noted, “Most of the LP is either totally random blather and white noise or disconnected rock jams sinking in a sea of blood and puke.” And yet, the review continued, “they manage to exude brilliance.”

“Sweat Loaf” was a rewrite of Black Sabbath’s ganja anthem “Sweet Leaf” and contains yet another potential band motto: “It’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done.” “U.S.S.A.” surely features some of the most hideous sounds ever recorded—the rhythm track sounds like an idling garbage truck as Leary’s guitar imitates a dying cow, while Haynes desperately shrieks “U.S.S.A.” over and over… and over and over. “The O-Men,” with its relentless, hyperactive pounding and satanic vocal prefigures the advent of industrial speed-metal by several years; on “Kuntz” the band electronically manipulates a Thai pop recording so that the singer repeatedly says a certain naughty word.

“Twenty Two, Going on Twenty Three” features a tape of an actual radio call-in show in which a woman described being sexually assaulted—it’s a terrifying listen, although as it turns out, the woman was a pathological liar who called the show every night.

After two albums and three EPs, by early ’87 the band was earning a decent living from royalties and touring, but they continually reinvested the money in their studio and toys for the live show. They could now command up to $6,000 a show, an astronomical amount for a band on an indie label. But for many months the road-weary Buttholes restricted their live shows to Texas, with occasional trips to other cities if the offers included round-trip airfare.

Then the highway department told them they’d have to move because they were widening the road and offered them $600 for their trouble. The silver-tongued Leary, arguing that he was running a business out of the home, wrangled them up to $15,000.

They used the money to put a down payment on a home in Driftwood, in the hill country outside Austin. Surrounded by miles of scrubby ranch land, the place provided a welcome respite from the hurly-burly of the road, as well as from the constant stream of friends and admirers who would otherwise be dropping by their place with a bag of pot or a case of beer, expecting to get wasted with the band.

But Coffey, who didn’t have a driver’s license, recalled the way he had always wound up stranded back in Winterville and asked for his share of the band fund so he could get a place in town. The band’s communal lifestyle was coming to an end.

After recording Rembrandt Pussyhorse in a hodgepodge of cheap studios and doing Locust Abortion Technician on an obsolete eight-track machine at home, the band wanted to record their next album in a real studio, and wound up at one of the first digital facilities in Texas. They had been playing most of the material on the road for some time, so recording went quickly, finished in about a week.

Hairway to Steven was more sparse, but just as strange as ever. There were no song titles, just crude little pictograms for each track, forcing radio programmers to identify songs by phrases like “Defecating Deer” and “Two Naked Women Bending Over.” The album’s heightened production values are hardly evident in the surging, distorted nightmare of “Defecating Pitcher Throws to Urinating Batter,” but things tend more toward the folk rock of “Syringe” or the downright pastoral instrumental “Urinating Horse,” with its acoustic guitar and nature sounds or the jumpin’ jive of “Rabbit Defecates on Fish.”

The anarchic presentation of the band had very little to do with its business dealings. “As a band they were grossly manipulative and demanding,” says Steve Albini. “If it was possible to take advantage of someone, they would—gladly—and they would feel justified in it because they saw it as their livelihood.” Even their former benefactor had a similar take: “As far as business goes, ‘sharp’ is one way of putting it,” said Jello Biafra. “I’ve heard the term ‘cutthroat’ bandied about quite a bit. Let’s put it this way: They’ve definitely got the Texas wildcatter mentality down.”

“We always fought for ourselves—that’s why we have such a trail of enemies behind us,” Leary counters bitterly. “I have no vast memories of cool people from my indie days. That’s where I learned how to get ripped off.” But that attitude sometimes left even their friends feeling a bit ripped off. Michael Macioce recalls the band choosing one of his photographs for the cover of Rembrandt Pussyhorse and then getting rebuked by Haynes and Leary when he dared to ask $300 for it.

Even as the band was committing mayhem, they kept one eye on the bottom line. When Macioce caught a Butthole Surfers show in Leeds, England, he stopped by the dressing room afterward, proudly displaying a show poster he’d torn off the wall. Coffey thought that was a great idea and ran out and brought back as many posters as he could find. Naturally, Haynes set them on fire, creating a roaring blaze right there in the dressing room. Leary looked on impassively as he kicked back on the couch, practicing scales on the guitar, pausing only to drawl, “Hey, somebody put out that fire before they decide not to pay us.”

“And then he goes back to playing his guitar,” says Macioce. “That was so Paul.”

Although they were the flagship band of Touch & Go, the Butthole Surfers were not part of the interconnected indie tribe that had sprung up around SST, Dischord, Touch & Go, and other labels. “We never did feel like a part of that community, really, not at all,” says Leary. “We played to their crowd, but we were not really a part of the scene or anything.” Part of the reason they weren’t part of “the scene” was the simple fact that they moved around too much to get settled anywhere, but their political incorrectness was a much bigger alienating factor.

The band was thoroughly do-it-yourself, but not for the political ends professed by indie culture—empowering the individual and staying out of the corporate loop. “Our goal was to become part of the corporate loop, which we eventually did,” says Leary. “I just never understood any of that ethics crap—you know, being self-righteous, this way or that way is the right way to do it. Nah, fuck all that crap—if people started throwing that stuff at us, we’d just immediately do the opposite. We’d start eating meat.”

At the urging of both Steve Albini and Sonic Youth, the Buttholes had signed with Blast First for U.K. releases. Blast First had released both Locust and Hairway, and Paul Smith’s hard work on the former was paying off. They did a celebrated European tour in 1988, selling out venues like London’s 4,000-seat Brixton Academy and appearing on the cover of Melody Maker (with their eyes clearly dilated).

With a little prompting from Smith, the U.K. press perceived the connections between the American Blast First bands and pronounced that a movement was in effect. Which is precisely the kind of thing that sells papers.

The Buttholes held other charms for the British music press, too. For one, Haynes was quite the irreverent wild man. When Melody Maker interviewed him, Thurston Moore, and Dinosaur’s J Mascis for a cover story about a Blast First compilation, Haynes teased Moore, already something of an indie-world Brahmin, relentlessly. “Hey Thurston, have you ever fucked Lydia Lunch?” he asked. The usually witty Moore could mumble only a half-baked comeback. “What did you say?” Haynes replied. “Fucking Lydia Lunch is like rubbing a dog?” The razzing didn’t let up there. “Thurston Moore? Is that your real name?” Haynes drawled. “I mean, give me a break. You made that up. That’s a good one. Did you have a mom and shit like that?”

Partly because of copy like that, the U.K. press was smitten with the band and conveyed its unbridled enthusiasm in their own inimitable way. “The Butthole Surfers are masturbatory in the best sense of the word,” wrote one overheated Melody Maker scribe. “But their ‘play’ is not light fingered, frisky or merely mischievous—rather, it takes the form of gratuitous devastation. Plunging in at the anus and excavating, tunneling a giant point of exit at the sockets, they are one giant surge of flesh, one part holy revelation.”

Melody Maker’s writing team the Stud Brothers breathlessly proclaimed, “The Butthole Surfers stand blood-stained, shit-caked and semen-sodden among the last unrecognizable avatars of romance, situated between the rational and the marvelous, stranded between this world and the next, this world and the last. They draw their power from those abandoned clearings across which higher and lower worlds once passed. All they desire is all you can do.”

Melody Maker critic Simon Reynolds astutely noted that the Buttholes were “shaping up to be the post-punk equivalent of the Grateful Dead—massive success built up slowly outside the conventional networks, a cult reputation built on impressionistic, trippy shows.”

And similarities to the Grateful Dead went even further than that. As the Grateful Dead were then doing for a huge second wave of new fans, the Butthole Surfers offered a glimpse of a freedom that had evaporated before their youthful audience had gotten a chance to drink from its cup. Haynes and Leary had been born in the late Fifties, too young to have participated in the Sixties counterculture but just old enough to have gotten a vivid impression of it. “Hell yes,” Leary said, “I wanna sound like Hendrix, I wanna be all those motherfuckers. I grew up wanting to be those motherfuckers. I think every fan wants to pretend that he’s the person that he respects and that’s what we’re doing, probably.”

The band’s sound cut a direct path to psychedelic-era freaks like the 13th Floor Elevators and Captain Beefheart. Live, they’d cover Sixties bands like Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, and Donovan, while the stage show recalled Sixties “happenings” like Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Pink Floyd’s early multimedia freakouts. So the Butthole Surfers actually came out of a tradition—“Yeah,” Leary cracks, “probably a tradition of taking LSD!”

Taylor quit for good in April ’89, after touring Hairway to Steven. “It just must have gotten to be too tough for her,” says Leary, clearly sympathetic. “She was a cute young girl and really sweet and here she was hanging out with the Butthole Surfers. She was a damn good trouper. I can’t blame her for it being too much after a while.”

After leaving the band, Taylor suffered what seemed to be an aneurysm, although it was later determined she was suffering from strobe light-induced seizures. “When the neurologist asked me if I had ever been exposed to flashing lights,” said Taylor, “I had to laugh and say, ‘You’ll never even imagine, in your wildest dreams, the shit I’ve flashed.’ ”

Although the early shows were exciting, anything-can-happen affairs, by the end of the decade they were becoming all but routine. At various predetermined points in the show, they would do the fire cymbal or tear up a stuffed animal or Haynes would twist knobs and dials and make weird noises for twenty minutes. The band seemed to be merely going through the motions.

Same goes for all the drugs and booze the band was consuming. “It was nuts, it was fun,” says Leary. “But then you think, ‘What do I do if I get off the hamster wheel? What’s out there? I don’t know.’ ”

Careerwise, the band was in a tough position. As early as Locust Abortion Technician, they were playing the largest rock clubs in town—and then kept playing those same clubs to the same faces for three years. “We’d sold as many records as we could ever hope to sell through indie distribution, we’d been exposed as well as we could ever hope to be exposed in the indie realm,” says Coffey.

Although major labels had come calling, none of them offered a satisfactory contract until Rough Trade offered a one-album deal for “some stupid-ass money,” as Coffey puts it, so stupid-ass that even Rusk reportedly admitted they should probably go for it. So in 1989 they signed with Rough Trade, whom they felt had superior distribution to Touch & Go. “We needed to sell more units,” says Leary, “in order to maintain a lifestyle that would be somewhat human.”

The band looked at the break with Rusk, their greatest supporter, strictly as a matter of survival. “If you look at punk rock bands from 1981, their success rate is not good,” Leary told the Chicago Reader in 1999. “It’s basically poverty, misery, and death. We had to claw and fight for everything. The ones that made it are the ones that fight. That’s what punk rock was about anyway. It’s not about causes or right and wrong. It’s about fighting.”

The title track of 1990’s Hurdy Gurdy Man EP is a cover of Donovan’s hippy-dippy-trippy Sixties classic; the video got airplay on MTV’s 120 Minutes, then a crucial outlet for underground rock, and the song became a modest college radio hit. The band even did a jingle for MTV.

The parting with their old label had been amicable, but by the time of their 1991 Rough Trade album Pioughd, the band was beginning to snipe at Touch & Go. “Touch & Go were smart,” said Pinkus. “They never showed us anything until it was too late.” But if Touch & Go were smart, Rough Trade was not: after releasing Pioughd, Pinkus and Haynes’s (as the Jack Officers) techno-house album Digital Dump, and Leary’s solo album The History of Dogs, the label went under. Unlike many other Rough Trade bands, the Buttholes came out of the disaster unscathed—not only had they already collected on their advance and been paid royalties, but since they had recorded themselves, they avoided the fate of many other bands on the label, who found themselves at the bankruptcy auction, bidding on their own master tapes.

The Buttholes made a small fortune playing the first Lollapalooza tour that summer. It was the first tour they’d ever done where they didn’t have to drive their own van, set up their own equipment, tune their own guitars, or collect their own money at the end of the night.

The following year they signed with the major Capitol Records. “As long as we have control over the music and the packaging,” Coffey says, “if the label wants to slap their label on it and distribute it better, let’s give it a shot—we’ve done everything else at this point.” Five years later the president of their label still wouldn’t say their name in public.

Back when Coffey was playing in the Hugh Beaumont Experience, he might have been repulsed by the idea of signing to a major label. And when he joined the Butthole Surfers, the prospect of signing to a major was so remote that it wasn’t even worth thinking about. “It would be like me saying, ‘I am not going to live on Pluto—Pluto sucks,’ ” says Coffey. “It’s just not going to happen.”

Leary had no problem being on a major label. “I always wanted to be on one,” he says, “and especially the one that Grand Funk Railroad had been on.” Still, indie purists accused the band of selling out. “If ever I got grief from those people, I would just tell them to kiss my ass,” says Leary. “You go live in a fuckin’ van, you asshole. You go home to your nice mommy-and-daddy little bed there and think about what a sellout I am. I had lots of good answers for those fucks.”

“To me, it was just a matter of, if you want to do something, the only thing that’s going to keep you from doing it is giving up,” Leary says. “Because we were proof of that. If you just don’t quit, you will succeed—that is the bottom line.”

CHAPTER 8

BUTTHOLE SURFERS